There exist historians of the 18th century who refuse to deal
with freemasonry. Their "reasoning" seems to run as follows: --
"The Masons believed in mumbojumbo. I do not believe in
mumbojumbo. Therefore the Masons are unimportant -- indeed,
virtually nonexistent." The eye in the pyramid stares out of
everyone's pocket -- and yet still these historians refuse to
admit that masonry has any historical significance. Nowadays,
thousands are afflicted with alien encounters, UFO sexual
molestations by the 100's; countless others are afflicted with
memories of Satanic Abuse.

But according to serious science, neither Satan nor UFO's exist.
"Therefore" the abduction hysteria has no historical significance
and can scarcely be said to exist. Right? No, wrong. Obviously
UFO's and UFO-hysteria can be considered as two different things,
lacking all ontological co-dependency. That is, UFO's may or may
not "exist", but they need not exist (except perhaps as an
"archetype") in order to arouse the interest of historians in the
hysteria and induce them to attempt to interpret it.

The hysteria is real and important, "history in the making" as
the newsreels used to squawk -- but its significance remains
buried because "science" has mistaken the content of the hysteria
for its inner structure.

Now that Freud has been defenestrated -- along with the
Unconscious -- modern psychotherapy can offer an all-purpose
etiology for all UFO/Satanic "memories": -- child abuse. In a
recent statement on the subject the APA cautioned that the
falsity of certain "memories" should not be used as an excuse to
ignore the underlying trauma -- or deep inner structure of the
"memory" -- which is assumed to be "real" abuse. The idea that
repressed sexuality in childhood might cause false memories to
arise as defense mechanisms in later life has been junked; the
"seduction theory" has been revived, and transformed into the
"abuse theory." This theory pre-supposes the non-existence of
"infant and childhood sexuality" (in Freudian terms), and in a
broader sense, the non-existence of childhood desire. A tendency
arises to regard the child as an erotic blank, incapable of any
authentic con-sensuality. Therefore all points of contiguity
between the concept "childhood" and the concept "sexuality" can
be subsumed into one new and exhaustive concept: -- "abuse".

The APA offers an interesting paraphrase of the abuse-concept
when it mentions "conditions that are associated with boundary
violations in [the patient's] past." New professional jargon
always provides the semanticist/sociologist a golden opportunity
to unpack hidden political and psychological content from
tell-tale words and phrases -- and boundary violation is a
veritable trick suitcase -- a richness of embarrassments. We'd
need a whole monograph to dump all the items jammed into this
little portmanteau.

The metaphor of nationalism springs to mind first of all -- boundaries are borders, violations are
invasions. The individual is hypostatized not as a sovereign
monarch (who might after all mingle and mate with other monarchs)
but as a closed-off area surrounded by an abstract grid of
map-lines, political separations, exclusions. A border-crossing
here is a violation, not an act of trade, or love, or harmonial
association. The border is not a skin which can be caressed, it
is a barrier. In relation to the inviolate body, all "others"
are simply potential wetbacks, illegal immigrants, terrorists
traveling on forged documents.

The next obvious metaphor is the immune system. In fact, we can
mix metaphors already here, like the Iranian scholar M. Rahnema
(quoted by P. Feyerabend in Farewell to Reason, p. 298) who "has
compared the effects of developmental aid with the effect of the
illness Aids." The meddling of Capital in the "third" world has
a viral effect -- it breaks down immune systems made up of
traditionally-scaled economics and values, and replaces them only
with diseased "growth". This is true -- but the use of the
metaphor is interesting, giving an air of hysteria and
hopelessness to the argument. After all, there's a cure for
Capitalism, but it doesn't involve non-contact among peoples; on
the contrary.

In a sense, Capitalism creates separation -- a
vicious parody, if you like, or grotesque exaggeration of the
"natural" immune systems of peoples and cultures. It imposes
uniformity but denies contact. The other, the "different", is
perceived as viral and threatening. The cure for this
"condition" might well be to deny uniformity but to make
contact. Ultimately it's not the "immune system" which is at
stake, but life itself.

The metaphor of AIDS has been a godsend to crypto-ideologues like
the APA, who can make use of its semantic effluvia in terms like
"boundary violation" to hint obliquely at the underlying agenda
of their therapeutic control paradigm -- i.e., to erase the
concept "childhood desire" and replace it with the concept
"abuse". If all sex is dirty and causes death, then everyone
must be "protected". Children here serve as metaphors for
"everyone". To "protect children" is to protect the spiritual
values of civilization itself against the threat of desire, the
otherness of the body.

No doubt the APA remains unconscious of
these meanings; but then the APA has jettisoned the unconscious,
so it's only appropriate that they should be among the first to
fall victim to its surreptitious return. The unconscious --
banished safely to the realms of advertising and disinformation,
or so we fondly imagined -- has come back to haunt us with
Godzilla-like vengeance -- raped by aliens and satanists! Our
boundaries are being invaded, and we are urged to "believe the
victim." The APA warns us that "abusers come from all walks of
life. There is no uniform 'profile' . . . ," etc. Anyone may be
an abuser, just as anyone may have been abused. Abuse is
universal. There is only abuse. Of course the APA doesn't
believe in UFO's -- but it does believe, quite clearly, that
pleasure is evil.

Some extremists in the "Deep" Ecology movements joined certain
Xtian bigots in hailing AIDS as God's plan (for overpopulation,
not immorality), and went on to suggest building a wall between
the US and Mexico to keep out the teeming billions of the angry
South. Cut down to a few million healthy hetero's America could
restore its "wilderness" -- which the Deep Ecolo's seem to
envision as something like the Ayatollah Khomeini's idea of
heaven: -- clean, pure, aryan . . . well, maybe more like the
SS's idea of heaven.

Ethnic cleansing is yet another panic
reaction to the sensation of "boundary violation". Abusers are,
above all, aliens -- even though (as the APA palpitatingly
insinuates) they might look like . . . . you and me! The other
is the locus of all forbidden desire which we ourselves must
deny and hence project onto the unknown. But of course, that's
Freudianism -- or even Reichianism! We have no desires. We are
the victims of abuse. Q.E.D.

The new catchphrase "multiculturalism" simply hides a form of
ethnic cultural cleansing under a semantic mask of liberal
pluralism. Multiculturalism is a means of separating one culture
from another, for avoiding all possibility of cross-cultural
synergy or mutuality or communicativeness. At best
multiculturalism provides the Consensus with an excuse to commit
a bit of cultural pillaging -- "appropriation" -- to add some
sanitized version of otherness to its own dreary uniform boredom
-- through tourism , or vapid academic curricula based on
"respect and dignity". But the underlying deep structure of
multiculturalism is fear of penetration, of infection, of
mutation, of inextricable involvement with otherness -- of
becoming the other. Again, there's a cure for tourism -- but it
doesn't involve everyone staying home and watching TV. It
necessitates a simultaneous attack on uniformity, and a breaking
down of borders -- it demands both a genuine pluralism and a
genuine comradery or solidarity -- it demands conviviality.

Knowledge itself can be seen as a kind of virus. On the
psychological level this perception manifested recently as a
panic about "computer viruses", and more generally about computer
hacking -- boundary violations in cyberspace, so to speak. The
government wants access to all computer cypher-codes in order to
control the "Net", the InterNet, which might otherwise spread
everywhere, transmitting secrets, even secrets about "abuse" and
kiddy porn -- as if the Net were a disease, rather than simply a
free exchange of information. America's immune system can't
take "too much knowing" (or whatever T.S. Eliot's lame-ass phrase
was); America must be "protected" from penetration by foreign
chaos cabals of evil hackers (who might look just like you and
me) -- borders must be imposed.

Cyberspace itself however involves a curious form of
disembodiment in which each participant becomes a perceptual
monad, a concept rather than a physical presence. Cyberspace
parodies the gnostic demand for transcendence of the body, which
is literally "left behind" like a prison of meat as one enters
the pleroma of conceptual space. Ultimately one wishes to
"download the consciousness" and achieve purity, cleanliness,
immortality. Cyberspace proposes that life is not "in" the body,
but in the Spirit. And the spirit is . . . inviolate.

A preview of this paradise can be attained through phone-sex.
Video-phones were never "invented" because too many people hate
their own faces (i.e., bodies) and don't want others to see them
(too much boundary violation). So, until cybersex is perfected ,
the uv-cyberspace of telephone-land -- a soundscape of bodiless
voices -- must be invested with all the sexuality we cannot share
with other bodies, or with "real-time" persons with real
personalities and desires.

The deep purpose of phone-sex is
probably not really the client's masturbation or his credit card
number, but the actual ectoplasmic meeting of two ghosts in the
"other" world of sheer nothingness -- a poor parodic rendering of
the phone company's slogan, "Reach out and touch someone!" --
which is so sadly so finally what we cannot do in cyberspace.

Of course the phone company, and everyone else, knows very well
that you cannot reach out and touch someone over a phone. What
the slogan really says is: -- Don't reach out and touch someone
-- that's a boundary violation! -- pay us instead to mediate
between you and the very sense of touch itself. The phone will
save you from being touched.

Why then use the slogan, "Reach out and touch"? Ah, there's the
secret of desire, Benjamin's "Utopian trace" still embedded in
the commodity. We want to reach out and touch, but we also fear
the invasion of sensation it would entail; by using the phone we
scratch an itch that we secretly know will never heal. We'll
never be "satisfied" by all this spookiness -- but at least we
shall be . . . . distracted.

Protectionism becomes the one true philosophy of any culture
based on mass anxiety about border violation; "safely" and
"survival" become its shibboleths and highest values. The
"security state" emerges like an abstract constellation figured
against a random patterning of stars -- each star representing a
threatened job, "dysfunctional" family, "crime-ridden"
neighborhood, black hole of boredom . . . .

Power in the security
state emerges out of fear, and depends on fear for its rule. In
the society of Safety, all jobs are threatened, all families are
dysfunctional, crime is universal, and boredom is god. You may
read the signs of this power not only in the texts of the media
which define it, but even more clearly in the very landscape
which "embodies" it. The PoMo architecture of paranoid urbanism
complements the already-picturesque decay of the Modern, the
haunted emptiness of industrial ruins and abandoned farms.

The
aesthetic history of Capitalism maps out a process of retreat, a
withdrawal into the psychic fortress, the "drug-free-zone", the
Mall, the planned community, the electronic highway. We design
for a life without immunity, believing that only Capital can save
us from infection. As we watch "History" unfold for us in the
media, including the media of cultural and political
representation, we become voluntary trance-victims of "terrorism"
(the secret inner structure of "protectionism"); -- in
consequence, our political acts (such as architecture) can
express no higher vision than fear. The design of private space
is based on the easiest antidote to fear, which is boredom.

Ideally, Capital would like to discorporate entirely and retreat
into the cyberspace of electronic wealth (and electronics as
wealth) -- of pure speed, pure representation. The infinite
"growth" which is Capital's concept of immortality will indeed
exceed all limits once economics becomes a matter of digitalized
data, or spiritualized knowledge, or "gnosis". Not long ago, the
glaciers of Capital covered the whole landscape -- now the "ice"
(William Gibson's SciFi slang for "data") is withdrawing from
physical space and retreating toward the pole, the mathematical
point of abstraction, where a new and spiritualized topology of
pure informational space will open up for us, like that "heaven
of glass" with which the Gnostic Demiurge attempted to con the
Angels of the Lord. And we shall be saved -- safe at last --
beyond all corruption -- gone beyond.

Of course, as you know, very few will actually be taken up in
this Rapture. Actually, you've probably already been
disqualified. As Capital withdraws (like an army fleeing from
phantoms, or phantoms fleeing an army), a great deal of social
triage will have to be practised. As the No Go Zones are created
and the wounded are left behind, entire new populations of
outsiders will be created. Too bad you'll have to miss that last
helicopter out of town.

"Homelessness" constitutes such a
Zone, a kind of anti-architecture, a shell from which all
services and utilities have been withdrawn, leaving only a
television blaring in a bare and empty room, broadcasting
cop-shows and messages of multiculturalism and dignity. That is,
the spectacle of Power remains, while the "advantages" of control
have been disappeared. Any overt symptoms of autonomy amongst
the "victims" can be crushed by the last interface between Power
and nothingness: -- Robocop, M. de Land a's "artificial
intelligence" or war-automaton, the violence of a society turned
against itself.

As the map is infolded, certain privileged zones vanish into the
"higher" topology of virtual reality, while certain other spaces
are sacrificed to the world of decay, P. K. Dick's Ubik, the
universal greyness of social and biological melt-down. In such
a scenario how can we play any role other than victim? We've
already lost, because we've defined ourselves in relation to a
situation of loss, and to a space of disappearance. In our fear
of all boundary invasions we discover that we ourselves have been
reclassified and categorized as viral. This time the
Abuser/Terrorist doesn't just look like you and me -- it is you
and me. The "homeless are criminal"; those who are not "taken
up" have clearly "sinned".

Of course, it remains entirely within our power to construct an
altogether different interpretation of "homelessness" and the No
Go Zone. We could use terms like psychic nomadism and even
nomadosophy to fortify ourselves for a revaluation of values in
which our chances of autonomy would seem to increase in
proportion to the actual withdrawal of Power into the
Simulo-Spectacle of too-Late Capitalism. We could try to
envision situations in which the "value" of homelessness would
mutate into the value of "aimless wandering" (as Chuang Tzu
expressed it) -- situations in which we could organize everyday
life into a de facto field of struggle for "empirical" freedoms,
palpable pleasures, festal arrangements.

For the "utopian socialist" Charles Fourier, "God is the enemy of
Uniformity." The true blight of Civilization is uniformity --
not union. The individual is realized not as the mass-produced
monad of Civilization's alienating social atomism, but as a
living star in a constellation of sexualized stars. In fact, the
Planansterian orgy is -- for Fourier -- the ultimate emblem of
the social, its heraldic device, so to speak, as well as its
clearest manifestation.

Think of those pornographic 18th century
engravings showing dozens and dozens of naked randy aristo's, a
bit of flagellation, a bowl of flaming punch, an aesthetic dance
of multiple and ambiguous copulations -- this is Fourier's
political programe, template for the ideal society -- Harmonial
Association. The body has not disappeared, nor has it become the
body without organs. But it has become the infinitely penetrable
body.

Physicist Nick Herbert likes to point out that for life here in
the mesosphere (i.e. between stars and quarks), here where we
actually live, juice and slime play an indispensable biospheric
morphic role. Juice and slime are the ultimate freeform
connective and penetrative tissues of living systems. Life
clearly has no interest in the antibiotic hermetism implied in
such phrases as "boundary violations".

Life uses borders and
life violates borders and life constructs media of its own to
fill up the extra spaces. The ameoba and the fertilized egg are
both sacs of juice and slime -- one grows by splitting itself,
the other by being split. Viral-like DNA is "freely exchanged"
in gushes of juice and slime -- liquid with paradoxical form --
the very liminality of form itself -- secret secretions -- the
viscous slippery in-betweeness of the organic -- the placental
wetness of becoming.

The appropriate architectural form for a society based on radical
conviviality might best be characterized as grotesque -- that is,
in the original sense of the word: -- the cave. Since the
Paleolithic, ritual space has always been envisioned as a hollo w
earth -- and in Mao Shan Taoism, for example, heaven itself is
honeycombed with countless grottos of faeries and Immortals,
dripping with cinnabar and sprouting with magic mushrooms. As an
aesthetic term grotesque refers to the organic-looking forms of
stalactites and stalagmites, to the curving spiralling line of
flesh and vegetation, which re-appears underground and is
transformed into the crystal of architectural space -- without
losing its snaky flowery curviness, or even it matrix-like slick
wetness, or even its colors. For the Gothic and the Baroque,
"grotesque" serves as a term of aesthetic appreciation; for the
Neo-Classical and the proto-Industrial with their mania for
straight lines, "grotesque" becomes an insult.

The grotto serves to house the "grotesque body", as Bakhtin calls
it.

"In his writings on carnival, Bakhtin maintains that one of its
most salient characteristics is its use of imagery involving what
he calls the "grotesque body."

Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated
from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit;
it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits.
The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to
the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world
enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body
itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis
is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various
ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs,
the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body
discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its
own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes
of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever
unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic
development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the
point where they enter into each other."

This describes what has been called Bakhtin's "principle of
permeable boundaries."

Folklore is permeated with the carnivalesque/grotesque, with the
Rabelaisean/utopian landscape of Rock Candy Mountains, houses of
cream and bacon, seas of lemonade -- a geography of excess which
found its theorist in Fourier (who actually predicted that the
oceans would turn to "something like lemonade" once humanity had
converted itself into Passional Series) as well as in Rabelais,
who drew more directly on the folkloric sea of story. But
folklore itself appears as a phenomenon of permeable boundaries.

Stories go everywhere, arriving long before anyone "notices"
them, and embed themselves at a level of culture which -- perhaps
more than any other human project -- represents the possibility
of unity without uniformity. The Omnivorous Ogre and the Giant's
Bride exercise an almost universal "archetypal" appeal because
they express certain basics of the body -- and the social body.
But in each culture the Dragon-slayer and the Ash-girl find new
names, costumes, dialects -- even different meanings -- without
losing their recognizable selves and invariable fates. The
worldwide dispersion of folklore is the most striking
accomplishment of the grotesque social body and its principle of
permeable boundaries: -- the creation of a carnivalesque
narrative which resonates in every land, uniting humanity on the
level of shared pleasure even while it expresses the infinitude
of archetypal variations.

The motifs of folklore act in a sense
as memes and bundles of memes, which in turn, have been compared
with viruses -- they carry meanings from one society to another.
The transportation of a folktale is a movement of meaning -- but
the meaning is never assigned (by an author[ity] or "tradition")
-- the meaning is given and received. Imagination here acquires
the function of morphogenetic mutuality, or social
"co-creation". This definition serves us better than the term
virus with its connotations of disease and terror. But let's be
clear: -- If we're forced to choose between "the viral" and the
civilization of safety, we'll choose the viral. If we must be
crude about it, we'll have to declare in favor of "boundary
violations." We're not just describing the "grotesque social
body" -- we're buying it.

Invariably however this rather existentialist commitment involves
a caveat: -- that the proposal here is not directed by some sort
of "high risk" nihilism or armageddonism. The real Doom-sayers
are the proponents of Order and Progress, whose world view
reduces them to a hystereisis of rigidity and body-slander. But
the proponents of a Feyerabendian "chaos" (an anti-theory) are in
fact the true biophiles, the party of celebration. We suggest
that the grotesque body is at one and the same time the magical
individual, the freespirit, the fully realized self of the
fairytale's denoument -- and also the infinitely permeable body,
the body of Fourier's "Museum Orgy" -- the body which is desired.

This paradox can only be resolved in the festal body; thus it
is the festival (with its ZeroWork and "promiscuity") that
functions as the crucial insurrectionary praxis or principle of
social mutability -- the creation of festal space, the creation
of carnival to fill the festal space -- the creation of the
temporary autonomous zone within the NoGo Zone -- festival as
resistance and as uprising, perhaps in a single form, in a single
hour of pleasure -- festival as the very meaning or deep inner
structure of our autonomy.

Who will give us an architecture based on the slime mold, the
bedouin tent, the baroque grotto, and the street festival of
(say) an Afro-Brazilian spirit-cult? The answer is: -- no one
but ourselves. The Supreme Architect is dead; long live
architecture. The Border Artists have already begun to assemble
-- the bricoleurs, DPs, smugglers and Poetic Terrorists of the
permeable interface -- drawn to the borders, where monoliths rub
and creak against each other, whole continents adrift, scraping,
shooting sparks, filling the air with ozone and orgone, shifting
with millennial dreams, hot, tropically hot, and notoriously
unhygienic.

This is the region of boundary violations -- border
raids -- penetrations -- some pleasurable, others catastrophic --
of cross-cultural synergies, ritual brawls, everyday life raised
("sublimed") to a degree of intensity approaching full presence,
full embodiment -- and yet still indistinct, romantic as a
reverie, an erotic dream of a utopian landscape -- at once a
wilderness and a "pleasaunce", a chaos and a ritual space -- the
democracy of the mingling of bodily fluids, of divine invasions,
of polymorphous sensuality -- sharing the break-down of
boundaries -- -- the infinitude of Passion -- the shaping power
of desire.

[References: For the text of the APA report, The
Lower East Side Rose (vol. 2, no. 12 [51], April 1, 1994); Paul
Feyerabend's definitive Farewell to Reason (Verso, 1987); and
J. Wafer's excellent Bakhtinian study of "Spirit Possession in
Brazilian Candomblé", The Taste of Blood (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1991).]